5
A jobless recovery and a lost generation
Jorge Blanco, 21, with his parents at his graduation from Loyola University Chicago.
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Tess Vigeland: For college grads, the relief of getting that diploma is now morphing into fear about finding a job. It's a terrible time for experienced workers, so imagine if you don't have any.
Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman came to Chicago to take the pulse of today's young worker-wannabes.
Graduation presider: Sarah Jayne Bisterfeld, magna cum laude, Jorge Andres Blanco...
Mitchell Hartman: I'm way up in the cheap seats at Loyola University Chicago, watching a few hundred business school graduates get their diplomas. There's the cheers.
Sound of cheers and applause
The fist-bumps.
Student 1:Thank you. We done did it. We oughta take a picture...
And... The reality check.
Jorge Blanco: My name is Jorge Blanco, I'm 21 years old, coming out with a degree in marketing and sport management. And my initial plan in the job search is to get a job, because I don't have one right now.
I sat down to talk about jobs with Blanco and eight other seniors, a few days before graduation, at Loyola's Career Center.
Blanco: I can recall a specific dream I had, where if I made a winning free throw, I would get a job. And I missed the free throw with an airball.
Blanco and the others did just what they were supposed to in their senior year: E-mailed hundreds of resumes, networked furiously on LinkedIn and alumni.
Wanna know what they've landed?
Katie Schaff: I have been hired by an architectural boat tour here in Chicago and I will be working as a bartender.
Student 2: Moving back home to Kansas for... not sure.
Student 3: I am stuck in retail indentured servitude at Urban Outfitters.
Brian Rehme: I actually have an internship with a public relations firm in Chicago.
At least advertising major Brian Rehme got an actual position in his field. Of course, it's temporary, no guarantee the summer internship will turn into a fall job.
Darby Scism: Not only are they competing with all the other amazing universities in the city of Chicago...
Darby Scism heads up Loyola's Career Center.
Scism: ...But they're competing with people who have been laid off, who have three, five, seven, 10, 15 years of experience. I've heard from a few students, "You know, I'm not going to find anything anyway, so why even start looking now?"
Why? Because if history's any guide, coming right out of the gate into a terrible job market could leave these college grads at the back of the career pack for a long time.
Economist Lisa Kahn at the Yale School of Management.
Lisa Kahn: It's early in a career when workers should be doing a lot of learning about their job -- learning by doing, on-the-job training. Even if an unlucky college graduate could shift into a better job, they're extremely far behind, because they've missed out on a crucial couple of years.
And many of today's grads may never really catch up, says Kahn, becoming a kind of "lost generation." Kahn's been following the people who stumbled out of college into the deep recession of the early 1980s.
Kahn: If you wanted to add up their earnings losses for the first 20 years of their career, they're earning about $100,000 less.
And career advancement? It isn't just delayed -- it can stall out.
Kahn: Young workers are supposed to move jobs often, because that's how they get pay increases, that's often how they get promotions.
But the 1980s recession-newbies stayed put in lower-level positions, or didn't move around as much.
Kahn: They could be a little gun-shy to leave, because they were sort of scarred by the difficulty of finding a job the first time around. Being placed in a lower-level job in a worse firm, because they took whatever they could, they're not gaining the right skills to be able to move along to the better jobs.
And don't think any of this is lost on today's grads.
Schaff: I remember the first time I heard about those statistics.
That's Katie Schaff from Loyola. She's the one with the bartending job on the architecture tour boat.
Schaff: And I was with my parents at the time, and I did the total teenage thing of "you don't understand, you don't know what it's like." And they were like, "Actually, we graduated from college in the '70s, we totally understand."
And since the 70s, says Kahn, there's one thing stressed out young people have always done to deal with their bad timing.
Kahn: When there's an economic downturn, everybody wants to go back to school, because the opportunity cost is quite low. If you don't have a job, you might as well be in school.
To see where this leads, I head to Columbia College Chicago. It's a prestigious art school downtown. Jeffrey Allen's 26. He landed a good job after college teaching theater to kids, but one the recession began, he couldn't find steady work.
Jeffrey Allen: I'm always scrounging around for a job. I don't really foresee myself getting married, starting a family, "settling down" any time soon, just because I simply can't afford to.
Allen and some friends are hanging out at Columbia College's summer street festival. They're banging out verses on manual typewriter for a poetry slam, hosted by the school's writing program, which is where Allen has taken temporary refuge from the economy.
Sound of typewriter
Allen: I had a few jobs, then I got laid off, spent five months on unemployment and decided "This is stupid, I'm going back to grad school."
Hartman: And then you picked poetry.
Allen: Yes, and then I picked poetry.
Allen laughs
And who knows, in this economy, it just might work.
In Chicago, I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace Money.
Hi to all lost generations, victims of pharisee serial killers!
1937-1967: 30 years Keynesianism reduce German Jobless from 6 millions to 0,15 million.
1968-2008: 40 years monetarism inflate german jobless from 0,15 million to more then 8 millions new poors.
Really enriching the richs must transforms middle class into new poors, because real interest rates never fall from heaven:
1968: Germany has 0,15 jobless. Bundesbank inflate financial cost, hard landing, then Germany has 0,4 Mio jobless.
1972: Bundesbank inflate financial costs again, hard landing again, then Germany has 1 million new poors, forever.
1979: Bundesbank inflate financial costs again, hard landing, then Germany has 2 millions new poors, forever.
1988: Bundesbank inflate financial costs again, hard landing, then Germany has 4 millions new poors, forever.
1999: European Central Bank inflate financial costs, hard landing, then Germany has 8 millions new poors, forever.
Then ECB created new statistical methods for counting less millions jobless discouraged workers (new poors forever).
So the Bundesbank statistics no more reflects the hard reality as they did before ECB...
First and second world wars has been caused from financial costs inflation and massive following unemployment:
Hitler gave to 6 millions german jobless a new work: soldiers...
Central Bank Japan deflate financial costs since 19 years to 0%, creating not Hyperinflation, but price stability!
It is the proof that richs monetarism professors are only liars, wanting to get really richer, by creating new poors.
Financial crisis 2008 is solely due to pharisee Alan Greenspan 2004-2007 inflation of financial costs of +450%
(from 1% to 5,5% FED interest rate means +450% more financial costs, dictated from the FED)
To rebuild the twin towers in 10 years with +450% more financial costs would have inflated the construction estimate +45%.
You understand now how rate rise create inflation, and why price stability occurs only after interest rates deflate to 0%...
Regards
Jean-Francois MORF
Polytechnic engineer
MBA HEC UNIL
Route Mon Moulin 4E
CH-1906 Charrat
S W I T Z E R L A N D
PS: pharisee have mostly jewish names, as all FED dictators have:
http://trader.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/02/18/liste-des-meilleurs-bonus/
"retail indentured servitude"...on the radio. What poor attitude and work ethic! What are you smoking? Have you worked a retail job recently? It's a miracle people survive off them, and generally speaking, the only retail workers I've encountered who don't regard their job this way are people who don't really need it (bored house wives or teens who just want spending money). Minimum wage sucks, as does being treated like shit. Investing all your time and effort into an education simply to find yourself trapped in a terrible job is a terrible experience. Amazingly, you can realize what an awful situation this is and still do your best at your crappy retail job. You can't expect people to maintain these wonderful "positive attitudes" when companies are only concerned with sucking American workers dry for as little pay as possible.
The recovery is jobless precisely because there is no recovery. We are in the early stages of a slowly evolving d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-o-n and debt deflation is the evidence thereof. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930's, it took about four years to hit rock bottom. Today's economy is much larger and more leveraged than that of the 1930's, so it could take considerably longer to unwind. But it will.
As a soon-to-be college student, this story reflects my fears about the future for myself and my peers. In four years, when I graduate, this situation will probably not have been resolved. And even for those of us who have decided on majors and careers, worked hard and laid out careful plans, we cannot count on success. We really will be lost--set adrift in a jobless society with credentials and nowhere to go.
